Love the basic RPG mechanics but tired of saving the World? How about Conquering it? Well, I'm happy to tell you that's the premise for Flip Dimensions. However, In order to get your hands on the world you live in, you must travel across the multiverse and defeat other Dark Lords and prove you are the strongest of them all!

Kazuki is a dark lord who wants to conquer the world of Theiweth, but all his dreams are crushed when a farm boy from a forest village with no combat experience whatsoever destroys all of Kazuki’s evil dreams (Don’t you hate it when that happens?). With help from his right-hand butler, Minori (Lady Butler, not a maid), Kazuki was able to escape his castle to live another day. Upon hearing about a legendary spirit that can grant wishes, Kazuki sets out to look for it still with the evil eyes bent on conquering the world... Only to later find out that the path to his wish may not be worth the effort and that the world he lives in may not be what it seems...

Across the game, you will travel across the multiverse to defeat that world's Dark Lord. Kazuki must aid the hero of these worlds if he wants an easy time completing these quests.

Some worlds include (Spoilers up until Mid-game):

Theiweth: A pre-medieval age fantasy, here religion is dead and technology is steadily becoming the center of attention. The Dark Lord of this world, Kazuki, want to conquer Theiweth to enforce his own vision on the world. The current queen sends Kamlyn to put him in his place, stripping him of his army and even his power.

Sineba: A massive desert. The only civilization that can be seen is a small town, which are the remains of an Egyptian-styled kingdom that mysteriously faded from power decades ago.

Mylitta: A semi-post-apocalyptic world that barely survived a robot outbreak just a few years ago. An organization known as GATE created dozens of factories across the world in it's prime, but the majority have been shut down after the incident.

Takeura: An oriental world on the verge of being entirely dominated by the empire. The last remaining village called to the gods to send them help, and to defeat the oppressors. Was Kazuki the answer to their prayers?

Ayldan: A desolate world covered in ice and snow. Whatever history that seemed to have been recorded her was either forgotten... if anything was recorded at all.

Kazuki: He wants to have control over the entire kingdom of Theiweth. To do this he much prove that he is the very best, like no one ever was. To fight the dark lords is his test, to conquer is his cause.

Minori: Kazuki’s right hand... Butler. She was taken in and raised by Kazuki like a daughter. Despite her loyalty, most of the advice she gives to the Dark Lord is in her own best interest rather than his.

Kamlyn: Hero of Theiweth, he is fated to defeat Kazuki even if that means traveling across the multiverse to stop him.

Suphis: The hero of Sineba. The Amazing Wandering Bard Narcissist who admits he's an Amazing Wandering Bard Narcissist. He has the intelligence of a child, but he's not that bad of a guy.

I think the story has great potential. I like the way the very opening parodies the great hero, and that we then play as the baddies. The portrayal of the relationship between Kazuki and Minori is very well done. The dialogue conveys their personalities – perhaps Minori’s is slightly better done, or maybe at the moment her personality is more developed. There is humour as well. Obviously in such a short demo there is limited space to develop characters beyond bare bones, but these two look promising.

I am taking into account that this is a very early build, and so some of the things I’m suggesting may seem a bit more than is required at this stage, but I think a successful game benefits greatly by putting in best practice from the very beginning. Waiting until the end to go back and do some things can become overwhelming, whereas if they are done as you go along, there is very little noticeable effort involved.

The first thing is interactivity with your NPCs. You have a couple who give useful information – some sort of response from the actors would greatly help here. Something which conveyed their personalities would help ‘disguise’ the fact that you are merely giving the player a hint about tactics which can appear to be a bit heavy-handed unless lightened up in some way.

Mapping and Graphics.

I like the title screen and the custom placing of the menu commands. I think the wording ‘New Game’ might be very slightly mis-aligned. However, apart from that you have an appealing screen which will help attract the potential player’s attention.

Your custom art for the 2 characters and their battlers are well done, and again visually appealing. But oh, what persuaded you to have that bright tangerine colour for the window skin? It makes it quite difficult to see and read the text. But above all, it is appalling. By the end of the demo my eyes ached. I beg you, on bended knee, please change that colour. I longed for Yanfly’s System Options in the menu so that I could do something about it, but alas, it was not there. The menu layout itself was good, and a refreshing change from the default.

You maps are, to put it delicately, not good. They lack detail, the interiors are too big – what’s with the hate campaign against windows? Not one in that town that I noticed, inside or out. The layout of the town is okay, that of the dungeon better than okay.

Make your building interiors smaller, they don’t have to fill the full screen. Here is an example of a very simple item shop. As you can see, it has plenty of stuff in it while still leaving plenty of room for the party to move around in, and it takes up half the screen at most.

Battles

You might want to re-examine how much exp you give for the different encounters. An orc gives 10 and a bat gives 7. Taking the bat as the base, the orc is more than merely one third more difficult; it certainly dishes out considerably more damage. Your boss has far too much HP, that battle dragged on for too long. At this stage the possibilities for varying the strategy and so having something a bit more interesting, are limited because of necessity the characters have few skills/abilities. It wasn’t that in terms of overall difficulty is was too much; more that with all that HP, it started to become boring the longer it went on.

Audio

I liked the music you have chosen, and the way that you have varied the SEs and MEs.. It all helps to convey the impression that you have taken time and trouble with the presentation. The only thing I did notice is that the quality of the music on the title screen seemed a bit blurred, especially that of the drums (if that’s what they are).

Odds and ends

Typos etc. I’ve put the corrections in brackets.

Attention to idioms.

You escape “by the skin of our teeth” i.e. by the narrowest margin possible, not “with the skin of our teeth.”

I clicked a bit too quickly, but I think Minori says “run downed village” instead of “run down village”.

Occasional typos e.g. character in the pub talking about the bats “…drop dead instantly is (if) exposed to light.”

‘Star’ “…fate had (has) sent you…”

“…if you can prove you are the strongest of the (them) all…”

Item descriptions

Ether says “Recover 50 MP” However, if you look at the more detailed item info in the shop scene, it says 200MP.

Overall opinion

I think your story has great potential, but at the moment your mapping lets you down, and you need to pay a bit more attention to detail.

Thank you for the very good criticism. I can use it to make the game better.

Here's just some of my responses to your post.

-Though I did expect this, all my projects to date have been criticized for typos (I'll be sure to fix the ones you pointed out) and I suck at mapping.

-If you look at the maps enough, most are just edited versions of the default maps, some are more obvious than others of course. But if it's such a problem I might go as far as to hire someone.

-The NPCs were rushed in at the very end, so I was somewhat surprised that you thought they were helpful, I'll be sure to add response from the playable characters.

-As for the battles, I admit I didn't balance them so well. I re-examined the boss I admit it has way to much HP, I'll probably go as far as cutting it in half.

-The title screen music used to be an MP3 file that I converted into an OGG because it didn't seem to play in RPG maker. I'll convert it again with a better program.

And lastly, thank you for playing the demo and showing interest in the project. Once I fix all the problems with the demo so far I'll re-upload it. But it's solely up to you if you want to replay it because playing it once is more than enough for me.

Get hold of screenshots of maps made with rtp or similar tiles, and just copy them yourself in the editor. See how they are put together. By doing this you will start to get a feel for how things relate to each other. This is, in fact, how many artists learn to compose their painting - they sit in front of another picture and copy it. Everyone, even those with a natural gift for mapping, can only manage to improve their skills by actually doing maps. Editing existing maps isn't quite so helpful in the long run.

A major, major help isn't in fact in the actual mapping, it's in how you arrange your tile sheet. If you look at how Inside B is arranged, for example, you will see that they arranged in such a way that they will never look natural against a wall. Now have a look at the tile sheets on this thread. You will see that the guy has rearranged them so that they look much better against walls. Use his tile sheets and your maps will automatically look better. Something else you might note from the last screenshot of his opening thread. He doesn't have a plain rectangular room. That is also a big help.

I'll try to find time to practice mapping, in the mean time I'll take a look at the edited tile sheets you linked to me.

Edit: Uploaded Demo Version 1.1 and added 'Version log' to the main post to keep track of what's added to each version. Besides what's stated on what will be changed, I'm going to start working on Chapter 1.

Another Edit: Demo Version 1.2 is uploaded. Time to start working on Chapter 1!

Thanks for the feedback! And yes, the game went through a couple updates. I wanted to make sure the Prologue was as polished as I can get it before I move on to the next chapter. Hopefully Chapter 1 won't need to go through the same processes, but I will make sure it will be polished before going to Chapter 2 and so forth.

@Ksjp17

Thanks for replaying, I'll be sure to update the prologue again when I upload chapter 1 so I don't keep re-uploading the same file every few hours again.

For a game with surprisingly little story it kind of makes sense. Being defeated by an unknown, untrained ex farmer from a forest village tells you everything you need to know, and I have always had a soft spot for games with reversed roles for good and evil.

Kazuki is fairly believable, both as a character and a bad guy, he is very trusting though which seems a bit odd. Minori is a bit harder to figure out, she is clearly protective of Kazuki but its not very clear why.

The humor is good, not to obvious. I like the armour name, i don't know if that's just for the demo though seeing as its the only armour in it. The comments about the flashlight is good, but maybe a little out of place in a fantasy setting.

Music and Sound:

Good music and sound effects. Only issue is in a new game it takes a couple of seconds for the music to kick in once the opening cut scene starts, maybe add a 2 second black screen to start the music before fading into the map.

Mapping and Graphics:

The dotted background makes it hard to read text properly, and the default colour is a bit hard on the eyes, but I like your RGB selector in the options so I could fix it slightly. Some text is very small, particularly in the menu. The character battler graphics are very nice, as are the face emotions.

Your interiors are a bit big on some of the buildings, they are way out of proportion to the exterior appearance, and some are also the wrong shape when comparing the interior and exterior. The shadows on the Inn and Pub don't match the building size (look at the shape of the roof compared to the shadow) and some don't have shadows at all).

The cave is well done, there was 1 clear path, but it wasn't too linear thanks to the side areas. It was a bit bare though, even for a cave, possibly consider adding some water pools or rock formations, to break the endless ocean of grey walls. Dripping water and glowing mushrooms are a staple of RPG caves.

Game-play:

Enemies don't move around much and seem to get stuck in corners, and not there are not really enough of them. I don't know what you have your hit and evade set too but I had one fight with an orc where kazuki missed 9 times in a row, and one the 10th time the orc evaded.

I never managed to get past the ogre, his attacks are way to powerful. His quake hits for more damage than I could heal for, even with the upgraded armour, and blind doesn't seem to make any difference to his hit rate.

Last thoughts:

I am well aware that it is still an early build but you have made a very good start. The potential for the game and story is good, I already have a few guesses about what the overall plan could be.

It took me 30 minutes to get to ogre, with 2 visits back to town to heal and buy new stuff. I gave up after dying to him 3 times and took around 40 mins in total to play. I look forward to playing it again as you update it.

Fair enough, I actually agree with most of it. But I'll try to reply to each point individually.

-Kazuki being trusting was a bit of an accident, but he's desperate to get power back as fast as possible, so I can see myself jumping towards my first option in his situation as well... but Kazuki is one of my first protagonists that doesn't resemble me that much so I hope I don't get his character mixed with mine. Hopefully, Minori will be much more clear once the game goes into her's and Kazuki's backstory.

-Armour's name will stay the same, just think of the flashlight joke as forth-wall breaking humor (for now)

-If the text is too small, I'll enlarge it slightly... hopefully I don't have to re-wrap to many text boxes.

-interiors were rushed, that's pretty obvious... I'll get to them later but they are much better than what they were in Demo 1.0, just trust me.

-Interesting idea to spice up the cave, I'll find time to do that.

-Working with touch encounters is hard, but I prefer it this way over random encounters.

-Strangely enough, none of the hit-evade stats are messed with, but I have the same exact problem. This is something I'll be sure to fix as soon as possible.

-Ugh, maybe I need to re balance the boss... again. I think all I need to do this time is just get ride of quake though. May I ask what level you were on when fighting him just out of curiosity? If you do manage to beat him, I'm a bit worried how unbalanced the rest of the bosses in the demo are...

That's basically it, I may re-balance the boss and fix Kazuki's attacking problem then re-upload the project again, but since nothing else is game breaking... I'll just wait until Chapter 2 is ready to fix them so I can update it all in one go.

Edit: Updated to Demo 2.2, hopefully the boss is better while Kazuki learns how to use a scythe.

Had a chance to play it. Here's my review of the prologue and part of Chapter 1:

Starts out interesting enough, I see you decided to make fun of JRPG tropes there (nameless farmboy attacks the dark lord), and you kept the intro short and to the point.

I was teleported to the village, and decided to wander around. I did notice a few nitpicky details here, which I will list now:

1) I can walk on the first tile of the 2 shelf tiles most of the time. There are a couple in the potion shop I cannot though. Did you forget to set one of the bottom tiles on the shelves to o?

2) I can walk around the counters and still talk to the shopkeepers. One way you could handle this is if the player is facing right (in the case of the weapon shop), have him make a comment about it. The main character could even jibe that dark lords don't need to follow rules, depending on how you want the characters to develop.

3) The stove tile...it feels odd to me. Maybe that is because there is a gap between the last tile you can stand on and the stove? One way to fix it is find Ayene's tiles, she drew up a set of two tile stoves, where you can set the bottom to o and the top to x passability. Then, the player can walk up to the stove, and not leave that odd gap.

That's all I had on the wandering around the village. I did notice that a lot of the text has a lot of whitespace to the right. Are you using Yanfly's message system by chance? If you are, the arrows no longer line up properly, and you really have more space to the right than you think you do. For example, the village elder was only using about half of the text box width, which looks odd to me. I'd see about fixing that up. Two ways to fix that up is use a word wrap script (which will auto-break your text for you), or trial and error.

Also, the opening scene in the village did have a lot of ..., maybe too many. It would make sense if they were constantly interrupting each other, or trailing off a lot, but it felt a hair odd to me. Maybe cut some of them out, and change some others to .

Finally went and spoke to the elder, got the quest, left town. World map feels small, did they teleport to an island? I assumed so from what was drawn. Just surprised no one commented on it.

Went to the caves. The hints from the tavern people were really helpful, I had no trouble at all with the monsters. Though, I felt like some of them were obsessed with Minori, what is her TRG rate??? I would go 5 fights and she would be the target of every single attack. With only 2 people maybe it was just bad RNG, but it did make me wonder.

Took down the Ogre fight, at level 3 and with all best armors and weapons bought. Minimal issue there. I think you have it balanced pretty well now. I do like how the monsters scattered once you defeated him, I use the same approach in my game, defeat a powerful boss, the rest of the monsters flee in terror. Makes backtracking so much better!

Ended up in the desert, got the third party member. Enemies still seem to love to target Minori though. Is her target rate much higher than the others, or did I just get (un)lucky? Might be something to keep an eye on while developing the game.

I did feel that the 30 second time limit was too harsh when in the desert, especially when you had to win 2 battles to exit. Thankfully you did not respawn the monsters after I failed, or I would still be stuck. Might want to increase it to at least 40 seconds, with 30 you can easily fail just because of the long animations in a battle (one turn averages 10 seconds, even if I spam attack as fast as I can hit it). I'd personally consider 1 minute, but that might be too high for what you are going for in the first zone. Maybe 40 seconds, and just one battle on the route to exit instead?

Had to stop there, needed time to write this up.

Overall assessment. Pretty good start to a game! Most of my suggestions are either personal preference or minor suggested changes, so it feels like you have the basics down with this game now.

Overall score, out of 100 (50 is Average): 82. Please finish this game, I wanna play the final version!

Thanks for the feedback, I'll see what I can do to fix some of the tileset problems and see if there's something about Minori's TRG rate (never touched it, but you never know.) I'll keep the other problems you mentioned in mind.

I'll get to polishing right away, but I'm a ways into chapter 2 so once I finish that chapter I'll upload it with all the bug fixes. Thanks for playing